Disk Trouble and Help from Ukraine
Suddenly, my old Buffalo LinkStation network storage at home crashed, and of course there was some data on there I had not recently backed up…so I took it apart (if you ever disassemble a LinkStation, note that they think it’s funny to hide a screw behind the model sticker – I found this out the hard way after a lot of cursing…) and pulled out the harddrive. After sticking it into a USB enclosure, I was happy to hear it spin up….but disappointed to get an error from my Mac telling me it could not mount the disk (it’s a Linux native partition that Mac OS X cannot mount). So what do you do??
I ended up finding UFS Explorer on the web. It’s software from a Ukrainian company called SysDevSoftware, and they should learn how to do a website that’s at least nearly as good as their software. However, running it on Windows (with Parallels by SWSoft, a company founded by a Russian entrepreneur….) the trial version quickly identified the Linux partition on my drive and I was able to read files from it. So I went on and spent the $22 in order to buy a license (“standard access” version) which allows you to actually copy all the files off the mounted disk. It works like a charm…the only drawback is that it seems slow, but that may be due to my Parallels setup.
UFS Explorer also seems to have disk recovery functionality, so I suggest trying it out next time you run into disk trouble…
Would you like to comment on this blog post? Get in touch with me and please do let me know where to find your comment. I'll update this post with the best of them. (Why?)